People let emotion ("standing up for the industry", anger) and misinformation (no one can fill classes) cloud their judgement on the last vote. September would have started our 30 flows per month provision and there almost certainly would have been more upgrades.

Good thing we went to the mat for our slightly below industry average contract though right?

 

What happened to those announcements some people were predicting?

 

Your MEC was selling this. Do you think they care that much when they are flowing next month or are already gone?

The "oh the chairman " is such a good guy crapola is not going to help you in the end.

 

Depends on your point of view though.

To date, the majority of pilots polled believe that regional airlines shouldn't even exist. About 85% believe this currently. A NO vote helps facilitate that belief. Regional airlines are a B scale, nothing more. The moment it becomes to expensive or burdensome to have regional airlines, the flying will be reabsorbed by the parent airline.

Now maybe your point of view is they should exist and if so, then there is something else to consider. Should one expect to be able to make a career at a regional or is it up and out?

 

So in your view, all the no voters mistakenly believed that DP and company would just roll over and cave in, saying, "Yep, they hanging tough, lets's not waste any more time and send all the new aircraft to ENY?" Do you really think all the no voters felt there would be no pain and consequences?

 

I don't think they were out to screw the group, if they were out the door why would the care what the pay scale is?

Eagles biggest hurdle is uncertainty, not quality of a contract. They could sign a lousy offer and if mgmt got off their back and made a positive statement people would show up. Newhires wont show because its difficult to tell if they're gonna enter the promise land or fall off a cliff. Its like the stock market, they only thing that scares investors worse than bad news is no news.

 

RJ PILOT posted recently that he just needs envoy to last 3 more years so he can retire, so I wouldn't buy too much into his "we need to get an agreement done now" agenda. I voted no under the presumption that things would get worse before they improved. I had no misconception about this. Those that say that there is no shortage, or impending shortage, because it hasn't become overwhelmingly evident within 4 months of our no vote are idiots. This shortage isn't just about the classes today, next month or 6 months from now; the shortage coming is due once the majors are required to hire upwards of 2000-3000 pilots per year, starting in about two years. Why the hell would we agree to guaranteed concessions for a 10 year contract in exchange for flow with that type of movement coming up? It's asinine! Once that hiring spree starts, regionals WILL have trouble finding enough pilots. Anybody that voted no expecting immediate industry wide changes was a fool, but I think (and I could be wrong) that most of us realized that the no vote was about a long term industry trend that needs to change.

I am not surprised that PSA and MESA are filling classes. They are the easiest to get hired by (allegedly), and they have shiny new jets. There is, however, only going to be so much time before the regionals as a whole start to have serious staffing issues. I just don't see how deteriorating pay and QOL beyond an already concessionary contract is going to solve that problem.

 

Do you really think the pilots have any say at all in whether or not the regionals exist? If you do I think you're vastly overestimating your role in this machine. If contracts truly mattered to regional pilots not a single person would go to Mesa, but they're filling classes. As long as the mainline carrot exists there will be no shortage of pilots trading short term pain for PIC time and the shot at a major.

As to whether or not I believe the no voters thought there would be pain, I don't. I believe the no voters got caught up in the union propaganda of a pilot shortage. The reason I believe this is because a lot of the most vocal no voters are the ones now desperate for an "announcement". The pilot group made a calculated gamble given the information we had at the time. We lost the gamble, it's time to pay the debt.

 

The pilot shortage is DEVELOPING. It doesn't happen overnight.

 

Less frequency, larger aircraft, "shortage" solved. Betting against very intelligent business people because your union is selling you the same story that's been perpetuated since the mid 80s is a foolish move.

Edit: Forgot to add that by the time the shortage "develops" if it ever does, we at Envoy will still be stagnant and those of us who are FOs will have weaker resumes than those pilots who went to PSA, Mesa, Compass, etc. Any way you slice it, we gambled and lost.